I don't want to speculate about the current situation at MtGox, but I wanted to share a little research about the recent big moves on it. It definitely made me think, and I didn't see this mentioned here before. We did the research together with @errge.

TL;DR: The big move on mtgoxUSD from 112 to 123 on Aug 19th was a result of a very few (about 15) very large (1000-2000 BTC) orders, which were done by a few (1-4) individuals.

There is a transaction every few seconds and then at 1376880984 (= 2013-08-19 02:56:24 UTC) starts a long streak of transactions with an ever increasing price that immediately follow each other.

We made an assumption that this was a big "buy" order and what we see is it "eating its way up through the order book". This looked very plausible, so we wanted to see how big was the order and what was its limit price. So, I wrote a script that looks for streaks like that and aggregates them. This is what we got:

Meaning: there were 156 transactions completed in 6 seconds, and if you add up the amounts you get exactly 2000 BTC. This can't be a coincidence! It seems this was indeed one order of size 2000.(The rest of the line is a weighted average price, the min and max price of the transactions and the amounts of a few biggest transactions within that streak.)

In most of these the amount is very round, indicating that indeed we found one exact order that was completely filled. For the non-round ones my guess is that they actually emptied the order book up to the given limit price and were not filled immediately. The proof for this is that we can sometimes find follow-up transactions matching in price which if added to the streak produce a round number.

Altogether these giant orders add up to about 17500 BTC, which is a considerable part of transaction volume during that period. And all the upward price movements happened within them.

We don't know whether all these whales are from the same person. But, based on the timing, I would say it's no more than 4 different players. And they moved more than $2M into bitcoins with 16 nice round orders.

Hmm. Its hard to speculate on what exactly it means. You've got 3-4 whales buying up a significant volume of BTC.... and its unlikely that they would keep it on the exchange if they were buying that large of a sum..... especially with Gox's going concern.

Looks like only 1 whale wants to sell BTC for fiat. Any way we could find out what currency that trade was executed in? What are your thoughts personally?

Very interesting, thanks for the analysis klao. I guess we don't know whether these whales were buying in order to sell on other exchanges (where fiat withdrawals are going through), or buying in order to buy, do we?

Very interesting, thanks for the analysis klao. I guess we don't know whether these whales were buying in order to sell on other exchanges (where fiat withdrawals are going through), or buying in order to buy, do we?

No, we most certainly don't. But if I were to buy bitcoins for 2 million USD just to invest, I probably wouldn't deposit to the exchange where the price is the highest...

On the other hand, if I were to know for sure (or >60%) that my exchange will collapse, I'd most certainly buy bitcoins even if my USD at that exchange is currently priced cheaper than other USD liabilities.

Very interesting, thanks for the analysis klao. I guess we don't know whether these whales were buying in order to sell on other exchanges (where fiat withdrawals are going through), or buying in order to buy, do we?

No, we most certainly don't. But if I were to buy bitcoins for 2 million USD just to invest, I probably wouldn't deposit to the exchange where the price is the highest...

Actually, if you executed $2m worth of buys, you would have paid more on bitstamp than on mtgox. Bitstamp's liquidity sucks, relatively speaking. So I can see why they went to gox.

Very interesting, thanks for the analysis klao. I guess we don't know whether these whales were buying in order to sell on other exchanges (where fiat withdrawals are going through), or buying in order to buy, do we?

No, we most certainly don't. But if I were to buy bitcoins for 2 million USD just to invest, I probably wouldn't deposit to the exchange where the price is the highest...

Actually, if you executed $2m worth of buys, you would have paid more on bitstamp than on mtgox. Bitstamp's liquidity sucks, relatively speaking. So I can see why they went to gox.

If someone wanted to execute $2M worth of buys you wouldn't do it on BitStamp or Mt.Gox. That size of order moves the market 1-3%. In reality, neither exchange has enough liquidity. You would want to place a dark order on Tradehill or a block purchase with an individual privately.

Very interesting, thanks for the analysis klao. I guess we don't know whether these whales were buying in order to sell on other exchanges (where fiat withdrawals are going through), or buying in order to buy, do we?

No, we most certainly don't. But if I were to buy bitcoins for 2 million USD just to invest, I probably wouldn't deposit to the exchange where the price is the highest...

Actually, if you executed $2m worth of buys, you would have paid more on bitstamp than on mtgox. Bitstamp's liquidity sucks, relatively speaking. So I can see why they went to gox.

If someone wanted to execute $2M worth of buys you wouldn't do it on BitStamp or Mt.Gox. That size of order moves the market 1-3%. In reality, neither exchange has enough liquidity. You would want to place a dark order on Tradehill or a block purchase with an individual privately.

Nonsense. You would have an average slippage of 3% (but you would move the market MORE than 3%) on Bitstamp with just a single market order of 500 BTC. A $2M buy on a BTC exchange moves the market WAY MORE than 3%. Just check the depth:

You couldn't execute $2M worth of buys on Bitstamp because there is no depth - you could do it on Gox, but "little by little", you need to be insane to do a $2M market order in such a tiny market as per BTC.